Free Agent Nation, Revisited

How has “Free Agent Nation,” Daniel Pink’s 1997 Fast Company article (which grew into a book), held up? Pretty well, the Harvard Business Review Group editor Justin Fox recently argued.

His post, however, inspired heated discussion in some quarters over the last few weeks.

In January, an economist at the U.S. Small Business Administration reported that from 1997 to 2008, “startups had created an average of 2.5 million ‘entrepreneurial jobs’ (that is, jobs for their founders) a year, and just 1 million ‘paid employment jobs.’” (That’s Fox’s summary.)

And Fox made the case that Washington has been slow to adapt to this trend. …